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Thursday, 18 June 2015

Nintendo E3 Round-Up!

After Sony's dream-like conference, Bethesda's Fallout party and Ubisoft's orgy of games, the pressure was on Nintendo to see if they could be the highlight of the conference: we expected skits, Iwata-isms and (Most importantly) games, and we may not have gotten all of those.

It all started off very well: there was a funny, light-hearted and very Nintendo puppet sequence that turned Reggie, Iwata and Miyamoto into Fox, Falco and Peppy. It was quite funny, and put a smile on my face, but the Star Fox Zero gameplay it segued into did not. It's co-developed with Platinum Games, and to be honest, the battlefield looks bland and empty - there's nothing going on in the world. I do admit, however, that the transformations look pretty cool.

The main theme in Nintendo's conference was nothing really happening. The new Zelda game, Triforce Heroes, looks pretty similar to Four Swords (A good thing) and I like the graphical style, but it looks like a game you'll need friends to play with. It's nice that Hyrule Warriors is getting a 3DS port, as I like the Warriors games, but it's going to be pretty hard to port considering the performance is generally terrible.

What's much worse is the new Metroid game, Federation Force, which looks terrible. I like Metroid games, but this doesn't include Samus and is ANOTHER co-op 3DS game that looks terrible. It also comes with Blastball, a 3v3 football game, which is just taking the piss.

They then proceeded to rattle off a lot of JRPGs: Fire Emblem If might be a good game, as it's a good series, as well as a couple others, including Xenoblade Chronicles X, which once again has some potential. Animal Crossing was also the victim of some serious spinoff-itis: Animal Crossing: Happy Home because it's a bland house designing game that really shouldn't be an Animal Crossing game. There's also Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival which looked quite fun as a party game UNTIL I found out that EACH PLAYER REQUIRES AN AMIIBO, which is ridiculous.

Nintendo then showed off some Yoshi's Woolly World gameplay, which looks very polished and awfully cute, but the platforming has been done many a time before; it needs to be a lot more ambitious. Yo-Kai Watch was also given some screen time, and I can safely say that it looks like every Japanese handheld RPG ever: collectable monsters, turn-based battles and a colourful world.

The next Paper Mario game, Mario and Luigi: Paper Jam, looks alright, but in the same way that Yoshi's Woolly World, it really needs to innovate. They both looked like solid games, but they also looked like games that'd been done before. Same with Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash: it looks the same as its predecessor, and for one of the most innovative game companies, Nintendo were really lax this year.

Last of all came some Super Mario Maker gameplay: there was way too much scattered throughout the conference, but it looked OK, the creation tools looking intuitive and easy.

Overall, Nintendo's conference was a huge dissapointment: there was too much time talking about nothing in particular, and there were no new IPs announced. Last year we got Splatoon and Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, but this year we got spinoffs, sequels, and JRPGS. It seems like Nintendo is concentrating their firepower on launch titles for the NX, rather then focusing on now.